A scheme for integrating e-services in establishing virtual enterprises

An important aspect of business to business e-commerce is the agile virtual enterprise (VE). VEs are established when existing enterprises dynamically form temporary alliances, joining their business in order to share their costs, skills and resources in supporting certain activities. Currently, existing enterprises use workflows to automate their operation and integrate their information systems and human resources. Thus, the establishment of a VE has been viewed as a problem of dynamically expanding and integrating workflows. We present an approach to combining workflows from different enterprises, using techniques developed in the artificial intelligence literature on planning. Our method takes two workflow views, one representing a service request and the other a service provision (advertisement), with a mix of vital and nonvital steps and a rich set of constraints, and returns a list of possible legal combinations, if any exist. It then uses plan-merging techniques to find potential conflicts between the two workflows, and to suggest additional constraints that can resolve the conflicts. The returned solutions represent terms for the establishment of a new VE, and can be evaluated by each side to determine which is most desirable.